Cloud based services represent a paradigm for offering different kinds of web services, which can be dynamically developed, composed, and deployed on a virtualized infrastructure. Typical examples of Cloud-based services include Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). In such services, generally, a service provider facilitates large pools of high performance computing resources and high capacity storage devices, which are shared among different users. Specifically, the different users share a set of centrally managed resources, rather than owning and managing their own systems.
Cloud-based services are expanding, and the rate of global energy consumption in these services is growing at the rate of about 12%. Further, the current overall energy consumption associated with cloud-based services is about 1.5-2% of the global energy production. Therefore, maintaining energy efficiency in cloud-based services has become imperative, and, controlling the amount of energy consumption in such services can lead to a major cost reduction factor for cloud-service providers.
The issue of energy efficiency in information technology equipment has been receiving increasing attention in recent years and there is a growing recognition of the need to save energy. Therefore, many cloud service providers are focusing on, and adopting different measures to increase energy efficiency. Some cloud service providers have attempted to reduce energy consumption by minimizing the usage of underlying resources, such as servers, storage systems, network bandwidth, and virtualization layers. However, such attempts heavily rely on the volume of service requests received from the users, and are only partially successful. Existing technologies have substantially focused on building methodologies in the underlying infrastructure that aim to reduce energy consumption. Unfortunately, the users in a cloud-based environment have very little knowledge of how the choice of a service affects the overall energy consumption. In other words existing cloud-based services are offered to users without requiring the user to have knowledge of the energy required for delivering such services. Specifically, when the services are hosted on a cloud, the solutions provide very little or no knowledge to the user about the energy consumption required for using a cloud based service. Such a model for saving energy fails to motivate the users to choose an energy efficient option.
Some green operations have focused on a “users-in-loop” approach to some extent. The “users-in-loop” approach involves the user in the energy saving process, by providing transparency to the energy consumption in the infrastructure, unlike other approaches mentioned above. For example, the ‘Share Print’ technology in the field of document printing services, promotes the sharing of printed material among users by providing some kind of incentives for avoiding document printing. However, an effective solution requires a more comprehensive configuration at the service layer because of multi-dimensional dependencies of configuration parameters on the green operation.
Therefore, considering the problems mentioned above, a need exists for an effective solution in a cloud-based environment, which may significantly reduce the energy usage during delivery of cloud-based services to different users.